So, this is a bit off topic so I apologize, but in my *humble* opinion, I believe the most important thing to fix the cottonwood canyons is to add access through American Fork canyon. Snowbird has been working on this for years, and has faced stiff resistance. If they pull this off (there is some environmental issues that need sorting out from the old mines from way back in the day), it would solve a critical issue for those resorts, the fact that there is only one way in/out of LCC. I would buy an Alta/Bird pass in a microsecond if I could shave off a big chunk of time (and fuel) driving into Draper to get into LCC.
I've been thinking a lot about transportation solutions for LCC. I would love for someone with more knowledge of American Fork Canyon to weigh in, but I highly doubt that this is a viable option for the following reasons:
1) It appears that Forest Service road #085 past the Tibble Fork Dam is a gravel road. I can't tell from Google Earth if it's wide enough for two lanes of car travel or not. I would imagine that the road would need to be paved and widened for roughly 10km or longer (hard to tell on the map) to where Snowbird's parking lot/garage could be. Snowbird is planning on lengthening the Mineral Basin Express as part of their Mary Ellen Gulch expansion, but would they need to add even more terrain going further down into the canyon? The cost of paving/lengthening would be very high. It's a different place and a different route, but the cost of paving/widening the access road from Panorama to Jumbo was in the realm of $200M. It would be less here, but still a lot.
2) I'm not sure if you're imagining that the path into American Fork Canyon would begin at the intersection of 92 and 146 near Draper, or on 92 past Sundance, but it looks like either way those roads are currently closed in the winter in addition to Forest Service road #085. Looking on Google Earth for both route choices (but especially choice #1 above) the avalanche danger is very high, so there would be a huge cost to UDOT to provide avalanche control in the winter. Additionally, either route looks quite a bit longer than the LCC road.
3) The environmental opposition would be enormous, justified or not. Look at how much opposition there is to Alta not agreeing to give up Grizzly Gulch (to speak nothing of developing it) or building a pocket tram up to Baldy.
The toll will just cut off the least wealthy of us off at the knees. We're sitting here in a thread where a new pass has drastically dropped the price of access to ski, and your answer is to figure out ways to increase the price in response to decrease the flow of traffic?
Mass transit up the canyon? They don't have the money or space to build a parking garage at the bottom of LCC, where is everyone going to park?
It has to be a market based solution where both sides get a win, there has to be some compromise somewhere. The clock is ticking, ikon isn't going away, the population is going to increase, and for the time being, the snow is continuing to fall.
In my mind, the short term solution is to implement either congestion pricing or paid parking at Alta/Snowbird, and use the revenue generated to significantly expand the UTA ski bus system by adding lots more buses, more parking at existing stops, and maybe even more routes. I get that they might not have the money now, but they could issue bonds or come up with some other form of financing that gets them capital now, and in exchange they get revenue from the tolls or paid parking. I believe that the resorts already give season pass holders free access to the UTA ski buses, but if they don't they should. The goal here is that the less wealthy can still access LCC for free, they just have to do it on the bus. I know the busses are overcrowded now (I just used them a couple of weeks ago), so that's why UTA needs to invest in building out the service.
This isn't a solution to the problem, but One Wasatch could help a little bit by letting people from BCC ski over to LCC. That could be built entirely using private capital. Again, some environmentalists (Save Our Canyons) will come out in force against it, even though it requires very little public land to complete.
There's probably a better long-term solution to the problem. I don't know what that is, but what's becoming increasingly clear is that a short term solution is needed. Reading that KSL article, I was disappointed that UDOT's short-term solution is to just encourage more carpooling. Carpooling is great, and more people should do it, but it's difficult to scale, and many people that can carpool already do. It feels like a cop-out by UDOT instead of coming up with a real short-term solution.
One last thing: this thread is mostly about crowding on the slopes. A transportation solution solves the problem of getting to Alta/Snowbird, but without corresponding terrain expansion it will lead to more crowding. Pick your poison
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